Paraguay in 2007

Area:

406,752 sq km (157,048 sq mi)

Population

(2007 est.): 6,127,000

Capital:

Asunción

Head of state and government:

President Nicanor Duarte Frutos

Political maneuvering in advance of the April 2008 presidential elections dominated Paraguay’s attention during 2007, even as the country was hit by a series of corruption scandals, violent incidents, and health and environmental crises. In December 2006 Fernando Lugo, the popular Roman Catholic bishop of San Pedro, resigned to run for the presidency. Paraguay’s constitution prohibited members of the clergy from holding office. Lugo, a fierce critic of the government, was seen as posing a serious challenge to the corruption-riddled Colorado Party, which had retained power in Paraguay since 1947.

Pres. Nicanor Duarte Frutos, after unsuccessfully seeking a constitutional amendment permitting him to run for a second term, began grooming his education minister, Blanca Ovelar, as his successor. She and other Colorado candidates trailed far behind Lugo in public-opinion polls, however. Although Duarte took office on an anticorruption platform, allegations of bribery, embezzlement, and other corrupt practices by various high-level government figures dogged his administration—including a case involving Education Ministry officials (serving under Ovelar), who were accused of having embezzled nearly $6 million in 2002–06 from a school meals program.

In July 2007 the six leading opposition parties announced that they had forged an alliance (the Concertación) behind Lugo to wrest power from the Colorados. The presidential race fractured in September, however, when Paraguay’s Supreme Court freed from prison former general Lino Oviedo after he had served less than 4 years of his 10-year sentence for an attempted coup in 1996. Oviedo, whose supporters also had mounted a fizzled coup attempt in 2000, immediately launched legal actions to overturn barriers that kept him, as a convicted felon, from running for the presidency. The former commander of the army retained a strong power base in the countryside, especially in eastern Paraguay. The second and third largest opposition parties, both allied with Oviedo, withdrew from the Concertación after he was freed.

In April, in one of a rash of kidnappings, an armed group took hostage a Japanese businessman, his secretary, and two Paraguayans who came upon the kidnapping in progress. The secretary was released nine days later; Hirokazu Ota (the business manager of South Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s church in Paraguay) and two other hostages were freed on April 20 after payment of a reported ransom of $140,000. Police shot dead six of the alleged kidnappers in a raid in rural eastern Paraguay in early May.

Also in May, an appeals court overturned the 2006 conviction of former president Luis González Macchi for concealing a $1 million Swiss bank account. He was freed after having served five months of his eight-year sentence.